


Exile Vilify

by vegarin



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Daredevil (TV) Spoilers, Gen, Post-Season/Series 03, Season/Series 03 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-23
Updated: 2018-10-23
Packaged: 2019-08-06 06:56:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16383455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vegarin/pseuds/vegarin
Summary: Post Season 3. Shelby has been incarcerated for over a week when she gets a visitor in the form of one Matt Murdock.





	Exile Vilify

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for Season 3 ahead.

When Shelby finally gets to speak to a public defender willing to spare any time for her, she's been incarcerated for over a week. Any criminal lawyer worth their salt has their pick at defending hundreds of people arrested for aiding and abetting Wilson Fisk. Someone like her—who had a direct hand in helping Fisk build his criminal enterprise, a virtual nobody without a penny to her name—would be lucky enough get a third-rate lawyer desperate and stupid enough to give up billable hours for a hopeless pro bono case.

A lifetime in prison. It’s still a better alternative than a lifetime in service of Wilson Fisk.

Better than being dead.

_This should be considered my last dying declaration—_

Like Ray Nadeem.

She’s still staring at her trembling hands when two people enter the interview room.

“Ms. Shelby,” one of them starts.

She looks up from her hands only because the voice of the speaker is oddly, incongruently familiar. So is his face, once she sees it. She blinks; it still remains the same.

“My name is Matt Murdock,” the man introduces himself. “I’m an attorney.”

 _It really is him,_ she thinks, struck dumb _._

For a long moment, she stares at the man’s hand around his telltale white cane, and then at his face that the tinted glasses can’t entirely hide. She's already seen this face on her monitor screen before; she’s seen every agonizing step this man took, fighting his way through the red-tinged nightmare of a trap that Fisk set upon him in the prison.

Behind the screens meant for Wilson Fisk, doing his bidding, she has seen many things, most of them uniformly terrible.

That— _that_ had been something else.

“I,” she starts, and stops, not knowing what to say. “I know who you are.”

That gives him a slight pause, which he covers with, “Right.”

“You—" she says, and stops again. She still doesn’t know what to say. What else she _could_ say. She tries again, “I was told to expect a public defender.”

That seems to put them on more solid ground. Matt Murdock shrugs slightly as he feels his way to a chair and sits across from her. “I pulled a few strings. I told Detective Sergeant Mahoney that we could represent you.”

“We?”

“Nelson, Murdock and Page. We can represent you—that is, if you wish us to.”

“If I were you,” says the woman who's been standing behind him, “I’d pick Nelson over this jackass to help you out.”

“And this,” says Murdock, without missing a beat, “is Jessica Jones, a private investigator.” He tilts his head up toward Jones. “You’d seriously pick Foggy over me? I’ve sprung you in half a day that one time.”

“ _Still_ not talking to you, asshole,” says Jones, stomping over to slump in the seat next to him.

Murdock barely hides a wince and turns to Shelby again. “We’ve been talking to the DA. You have an intimate knowledge of Fisk’s operations, and you have the skills. In exchange for helping them dismantle his remaining operations—”

“But I can’t,” Shelby yelps in panic. "If he—if Fisk finds out that I in any way cooperated with you, if he even gets a wisp of the sense that I’m betraying him, he will—” She can’t say it. Even saying this much out loud is a risk.

Jones glances at Murdock and says, "We know." She sounds unexpectedly gentle. “That scumbag took your mom. We already found her, and she’s fine.”

Relief slams into her chest, like a blow, and before she realizes it, Shelby is bawling her eyes out.

“Your mother wasn’t the only one,” Murdock adds, even more gently. “There were others. This morning some of our friends found the hospice where many of them had been held. Your mother is at the Metro right now with the most of them. She’s going to be fine.”

Gradually, relief floods into her, settles, and she can begin to breathe again. Shelby listens in a daze as Murdock continues to explain, slowly and patiently, the efforts that have gone into rescuing those who have been threatened into Fisk's service.

“And the last few days, Ms. Jones has been, quite kindly, I might add"—Jones rolls her eyes sky high—"helping us track down those who were forced into Fisk’s service and figure out the leverage he’s held over them.”

Murdock stops, and both he and Jones look at Shelby expectantly. They’re waiting for her to agree to their help, she realizes.

“But why?” Shelby blurts out.

Murdock tilts his head in an unspoken question. “Why what?” Jones asks.

“Why are you helping me? I’ve done terrible things. Unforgivable things. I’ve helped Fisk destroy people’s lives. I’ve helped him _kill_ people.”

It's the first time she's admitted it out loud. Her head falls and she wrings her hands.

She's seen Ray Nadeem’s dying message. Everyone has. But unlike everyone else, she’s also seen every cornered moment of Agent Nadeem’s life that has gone so very wrong at the hands of Fisk, flashing across her screens in slow motion like a sick, twisted version of a reality TV. She’s seen a good man trying his best to remain good, and in failing that, choosing desperate death over life to save his family.

She’s never for a second had Agent Nadeem’s courage to fight back. Instead, she's helped a monster hurt so many of those who had fought him, helped him leave a string of death bodies.

She looks up from her hands again and sees that Matt Murdock has been listening quietly. “You—you know that better than anyone else.”

Fisk hated, _loathed,_ the lawyer from the prison, this Matt Murdock, to the point that it may have approximated fear to Fisk. It was something Shelby had never seen in him before. It terrified her.

So perhaps it was almost no surprise to see the man appear in her monitoring room, behind a black mask, promising to put an end to Fisk’s terror. A purely inconceivable notion.

And yet he has done just that. Ended Fisk’s terror.

And here he is, now.

“I’ve helped him do his very best to kill you,” Shelby says, trembling. “How could you still want to help me?"

Shelby can no longer look at his face. For a moment, no one speaks.

“Look, lady, here is the thing,” Jessica Jones cuts into the silence, almost expertly flippant. “That fat scumbag got to you. If you didn’t do as you were told, you would’ve just become another pretty corpse he'd mow over on his way to find another one to do his dirty work."

Shelby doesn’t argue the point. Her eyes tear up again.

“You did what you had to do to survive,” Jones says roughly. “And guess what, you’ve survived. You’re still here. So, the question is, now what?"

Shelby looks up again at the woman. Behind the hard voice, there’s pain there that even Shelby could recognize.

Murdock, half turned toward Jones, seems to restrain himself before offering any comforting words to her. Instead, he leans toward Shelby. “What you’ve done was under duress and in fear. Regardless of what you've done, everyone deserves a second chance.”

His voice is calm and direct, every word so steeped in implausible conviction that Shelby has to ask, in a small voice, “Even Fisk?”

Because Fisk is still alive.

Even after all the terrible things that the man has done, he’s still alive. And it's mostly because the man in front of her hasn’t killed Fisk when he had more than one chance to do so. She has seen it and she can’t understand it all.

There’s a long pause as Murdock— _the D_ _evil of Hell's Kitchen,_ she thinks, even though the very idea is so irreconcilable with this mild-mannered, _blind_ man she now sees—seems to weigh his answer.

“Everyone does,” he says, finally. There's quiet strength behind it, like it's been tested and found unwavering. It’s also an answer given almost to himself than to her. “No matter who it is.”

"Christ," Jones grits out, not quite under her breath. "Only Matt fucking Murdock."

Murdock leans back, visibly raising an eyebrow at Jones. "You shouldn't take the Lord's name in vain."

“You shouldn't make me want to punch a blind man,” says Jones, warningly.

"Since when has that ever stopped you?" Murdock asks, sounding genuinely curious.

“You shouldn't make me want to punch a blind man in  _the police station_ ,” Jones revises.

“A fair point.” Murdock nods thoughtfully. “I would have to spring you again, and we really don’t have the time for that this week."

Jones makes an alarming noise, like she’s seriously considering punching him out right there and right then, but Murdock, with a faint smile, turns to Shelby.

"Ms. Shelby, everyone deserves to earn their second chance. If I didn't believe it, I wouldn't be doing what I do.” He swallows. “I almost couldn’t.”

She remembers the very last scene she’s seen on her monitors before the police swept in. Daredevil, standing over Kingpin. The terrible fight. The one she watched with every breath held frozen. And its end.

_You don’t get to destroy who I am—the city rejected you. It beat you. I beat you._

The man in front of her survived all that.

She, too, has survived. She's still here.

_So, now what?_

And maybe Shelby understands just then, just a little.

“I never got to say thank you, did I?” Shelby asks, mostly to herself. “Before.”

That surprises him, she could tell. “Thank you for everything. I will do everything I can to help,” she says, meaning it. “And I would be—more than grateful if you could represent me, Mr. Murdock."

Murdock smiles again. It's a small one, but it brightens his whole face. He promises to talk to the DA in the afternoon to arrange her mother's visit; he promises to come back with a good news.

Shelby believes him. She's seen him beat the odds, after all.

And maybe, she will, too.

“Well, about time," Jones grouches when they're done, begrudgingly letting Murdock take her arm to lead him out of the interview room. “Can you get a move on? ’Cause we have like four more people to rescue or save or whatever this morning.”

"So,” Murdock says blithely, "you  _are_  talking to me now, I take it?”

"Seriously, Murdock. _So much punching_. Right in your face."

Before the door closes, the last thing Shelby sees is the face of Devil, breaking into laughter.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> _And Jessica beat Matt solidly for an hour for not letting her and the rest of the Defenders know that he was alive. /The end._
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> After S3, I have feelings. _Feelings._ Not sure what all of them are yet or how to begin articulating them, but here is one that came out of nowhere.
> 
> *Title from a song by The National


End file.
